Rob Pardo: The Next WoW Expansion is Going to be Awesome
It seems things are already in motion for the next World of Warcraft expansion and Rob Pardo is more involved this time!

Brawler's Guild Updates
The Horde Brawler's Guild was updated in the latest PTR patch, making it less plain looking. It is clearly still in the middle of changes, as a wall is missing and some NPCs are floating. Milhouse Manastorm will be making his return as one of the harder bosses you get to fight!

Pet Battle Rankings
If pet battles are not already exciting enough for you, maybe these rankings will help. WoWProgress added pet battle rankings this week, based on the number, quality, and level of the pets you have collected. The top ranked players are nearing 20 rare level 25 pets!

Mists of Pandaria Flying for AltsWTB Book of Pandaren Flying (BoA - requires level 90 to purchase) = 2400gold, PST.
We're not sure if we'll be doing this. The tome worked out well enough for Wrath of the Lich King as an experiment, but so much of the experience we spent a lot of time and effort shaping in Pandaria is negated by flying. In addition to the upcoming reputation changes for alts (when a character on the account hits Revered), we'll consider other methods of potentially speeding up the leveling process for alts, but we don't think "allow flying" is necessarily the best answer. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

This is correct. It's a similar release to what we did with Mogu'shan Vaults.

Neth, any clue as to what the ilvl requirement's will be for HOF LFR?
The iLevel for the Raid Finder will be a minimum of 470. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blingtron 4000"The Blingtron 4000 will be fully stocked with a variety of fun items such as Party Grenades, but even better than that, it has a chance (a very, very small one) to give the gift of an Engineering mount or pet."

Does that include the Depleted-Kyparium Rocket and Geosynchronous World Spinner
You are perceptive. There is a very small non-zero chance for a mount or pet from the Blingtron 4000 Gift Package. We heard you like bling so your pal Blingtron may be getting some minor upgrades to their bling in an upcoming patch.

Players BottingBut why would Blizzard ban bots?
They have a active subscription and pay money.
Why would any company reduce their own income on purpose?
It doesn't make sense... Allthough I don't like so many bots either.
But for them to actualy ban most of them, and lose out on so much money
from the botter's subscription.. Would they realy do that. I don't know.
I think Nevalistis summed this up quite well: This is one of the biggest misconceptions we have, and I genuinely wish we could permanently clear it up. I'll provide a few hypothetical situations (mind you, these numbers are ENTIRELY made up).

Let's say 90% of botters were compromised accounts. This means that 90% of these botters aren't paying accounts; they're stolen accounts, which are generally fueled by stolen credit cards. These payments usually get disputed and taken back, which actually costs us money. If we're looking to make a purely fiscal observation, it makes no financial sense to let these continue (aside from the fact that we don't like compromised accounts to begin with - we want our players to be playing their own accounts safely and enjoyably).

Let's go on the other side of the fence and say 90% of these botters were otherwise legitimate players paying for their accounts, as you purport. When players bot, other players are inconvenienced by this behavior (and trust me, you guys outnumber the botters, even if you may feel it's the other way around). The inconveniences range from normal players having difficulty farming on their own to struggling to keep up with an economy that's being forcibly fluctuated via unfair advantage. When players are inconvenienced in this manner, they submit petitions.

Every petition submitted goes to a Game Master for review. A living, breathing person that is paid to provide customer service looks over it, does what's necessary for the situation (in botting cases, usually forwarding the info on to our exploitation/hacks team), and provides a response. Let's say 1-2 people are inconvenienced by a single botter (in all likelihood, we probably get many more petitions per botter than that). This would mean each botter is inconveniencing at least as many, and likely more, players that are positive to the community (the kinds of players we like and want to continue to play our game). For each botter we allow to continue botting, we potentially stand to lose more than we gain for a single subscription, just out of the sheer inconvenience it causes other players.

Even if you change those numbers around of legitimate players versus compromised accounts - we only stand to lose more if we don't take action on bots (which we do, regularly).

And that's probably the problem. If I can stand in front of a guy who's botting who has about as many achievement points as me, then the only reason why he dares to bot is because he does not feel there is a risk of losing anything by doing so.

And the worst part is that right now it's difficult to say that he isn't right.
Those who choose to believe they are above detection range far and wide, I’m sure. Possibly because they may have been getting away with it for a time. However, we investigate every single bot report that comes in. We don't usually deal with the reports immediately because the underlying issue would remain in place.

What we do is study the bots, see exactly how they do what they do, and fix it so that they don’t work anymore. Once we’ve applied the fix, then the ban waves take place. By doing it like this, we can also come up with better methods of detection, and devise systems that are more effective against bot detection and removal.

Having said that, it's an on-going fight. Botters develop new bots by working out what we detected and fixed, and it starts all over again. In the process, we’ve ruled out one way of cheating the system though. I can’t go into much more detail without providing botters with information that would help them (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Death in The Arboretum
Yes, we know it's a little awkward to get back to your corpse here, and we're looking into the placement of the graveyard nearest to the Cloud Serpent dailies. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)Warrior Tanking Feedbackwould like to know what about it you like over the cataclysm model.
Getting rage when you use your abilities and not when you get hit and not being constantly at max rage.
Cata felt a bit spammy, constantly hitting cleave or heroic strike to spend rage was not my favourite thing. This got to the point where some players simply macro’ed HS to devastate because it was out of the GCD and still rarely got rage starved.

I’m really enjoying tanking with my warrior right now, I did enjoy it in Cata as well I must say, but it’s just better now, revenge and shield slam feel great, and you can use the rage that they generate for when you really need to minimize damage taken, or, if you feel confident about your survivability you can use that rage with offensive abilities like heroic strike, but it’s the decision making process that I enjoy, rage doesn’t feel free anymore, you actually have to think and make a trade-off, or even predict when you need to save more rage and build it up for a moment where you know it would be effective and efficient to use a mitigation cooldown like shield barrier or shield block, that’s just good design in my opinion. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Tweets

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

QuestingRemove class specific quest rewards? When none of the items are an upgrade, I would always chose the one that sells for most
They are all worth the same amount now. (Source)

About questing in a raid group: I'm probably missing something, but what is problematic about people forming "questing raids"?
It is so efficient that it would feel mandatory. Every realm would have a continual Golden Lotus raid etc. (Source)

Will we need to be honored with Wrathion or have to have completed the legendary questline to do his new 5.1 questline?
Wrathion's Legendary questline in 5.1 is a continuation of the 5.0 quests, so you'll have to do them all!

Are you guys happy with the daily system playing such a large role in end-game content?
I think the valor and charms feel good because you can cap them. I think rep itself would be better with a cap. (Source)

Are you considering changing the reputation system? So many dailies are burning us down from the game. Tabards back?
When we tried limits, folks said we were playing nanny. When we tried nothing, folks said they didn't have anything to do. (Source)

WorldWhy can I not fly in Silvermoon? I cry every time I go back...
It would take months to fix, which means you'd get less other stuff. Challenging for us to justify. Org hard but still easier. We feel like BEs have been neglected a bit lately. We won't forget them. (Source)

The problem for me is that it's one of the situations you talk a lot about avoiding; taking an existing toy away from players. (Loss of increased running speed as a ghost)
It's often easy to make players happy in the short term but not the long term, even though the latter is more important.

Curse Weekly Roundup
Pico and the team are back with a special Halloween themed Weekly Roundup. It has some WoW, Minecraft, GW2, and LoL news, along with the weekly Game Forecast!

I don't know who this Rob is, but he has the right attitude. Instead of lying or just flat out being delusional - he admits to a fault blizzard has. He says they can be slow getting stuff out, which we all know is the case. Why are they already talking about the next expansion, like MoP is some kind of after thought of an expansion.

I don't know who this Rob is, but he has the right attitude. Instead of lying or just flat out being delusional - he admits to a fault blizzard has. He says they can be slow getting stuff out, which we all know is the case. Why are they already talking about the next expansion, like MoP is some kind of after thought of an expansion.

They're currently working on stepping up the time in between content. Patch 5.1 ptr for example. MoP is 1 month and 3 days old and 5.1 is already a few weeks away from going live.

Salamala, Blizzard starts work on a new expansion before they release the previous one. They've been tossing around, internally, ideas on what to do for WoW 6.0 since before Pandaria was launched - just like Pandaria was in the concepts stage before Cata came out, etc, etc, all the way back to Vanilla being in Beta Testing when they started work on Burning Crusade.

Salamala, Blizzard starts work on a new expansion before they release the previous one. They've been tossing around, internally, ideas on what to do for WoW 6.0 since before Pandaria was launched - just like Pandaria was in the concepts stage before Cata came out, etc, etc, all the way back to Vanilla being in Beta Testing when they started work on Burning Crusade.

And according to a PC Gamer article from before Alpha, Vanilla and WC3/TFT were being worked on side-by-side at one point.

The sheer fact that we have people being so asinine as to split hairs over the exact definition of content is a sign that there isn't any worth discussing for non-raiders.